Ask HN: Should I be afraid of the JVM?

I've been looking to expand my programming language knowledge and have my eye looking towards Scala and Kotlin.

However, both of them run on the JVM, and the Java part sort of puts me off, since I make a conscious decision to not learn Java at the moment, due to a complex ecosystem that would take me a long time to enter.

Is this little feeling I have founded? I mean, I think that at some point I'll be debugging something and will hit some place where I have to interact with some Java code and will be totally powerless. Does it even make any sense?